


The Bells

by fluorescentgrey



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Old Kingdom - Garth Nix
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Angst, Body Horror, Community: rs_games, Death, Horror, M/M, New York State, R/S Games 2016, Violence, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-08-27 21:28:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8417527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: R/S Games 2016 - Day 21 - Team Place
Upstate New York, after the fall. “Some of the ways death had come to work were obvious, and they were new and necessitated negotiation, but other ways were invisible, or at least invisible unless you cared to look very closely, and thus perhaps they had been as such forever.”





	

**Author's Note:**

> **Team:** Place  
>  **Title:** The Bells  
>  **Rating:** R  
>  **Warnings:** sex, violence, some body horror, zombies, lots of death (but it's hopeful)  
>  **Genres:** angst, horror/adventure, magic AU  
>  **Word Count:** 23,000  
>  **Summary:** Upstate New York, after the fall. “Some of the ways death had come to work were obvious, and they were new and necessitated negotiation, but other ways were invisible, or at least invisible unless you cared to look very closely, and thus perhaps they had been as such forever.”  
>  **Notes:** Necromancers’ bells and the treatment of death in this story are borrowed from Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom series, and much of the plot is borrowed from Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell.” The rest is inspired by the ineluctable presence feeling of the Adirondacks and the New York north country. Thank you Beyond to E for all your support, your encouragement, and your beta read.  
>  **Prompt:** #21 - Picture of a darkened landscape with lightning striking in the distance.  
> 

I.

“I have the same dream,” Remus told him, “over and over.”

The moon came in upon the floor through the cloudy windows and outside against the rocky shore of the island the wind had whipped up whitecaps on the water.

“I don’t know if I ever told you,” said Remus. Sirius could feel more than hear him speak, because they were very close together in the bed, and Remus’s breath was very warm against the crook of his neck and shoulder, and usually he didn’t like to be held, but he had condescended this time to allow it.

“You’ve never told me,” Sirius said. “What’s the dream?”

“Just — it’s just lightning.” He sighed, and he pressed, somehow, impossibly closer, and Sirius’s grip tightened; sometimes they clung to one another like the last survivors of a shipwreck, which he thought occasionally in fact they were, but they never spoke about it. “Lightning — and a fence and a distant mountain.”

He thought he knew now why Remus had brought it up. He could see it like some burnt inscription or a shadow of a ghost when he closed his eyes.

\--

Sirius was in a bar in Troy waiting for his motorbike to be repaired when Albus Dumbledore waltzed onto the premises and waved the bartender over with a flourish of his gilded sleeves. He must’ve paid off Sirius’s preferred mechanic, he thought, to clue him in as to when Sirius came back to town. He had frequented that garage in the seven years since he’d inherited the bike solely because they would often accept bribes.

Dumbledore took the seat directly beside Sirius despite the fact the bar was empty. “What are you drinking?”

“Go away.”

“Two gin and tonics for me and Mr. Black, Louie,” said Dumbledore to the bartender. “You look well, Sirius.”

“Yes, well, it’s a side effect of no longer working for you.”

When he thought about it later his first mistake was to engage at all. He should have gotten up upon sight of the old man and walked out the door. But he had not. Perhaps it was simply the promise of the forthcoming second gin and tonic. Otherwise it was whatever dregs remained in him of his loyalty or obedience. He knew what Dumbledore thought of him; they had had it out just before the dissolution of the Order. And he also knew that if Dumbledore had set plans in motion to entrap him in a shitty bar in Troy it could be for absolutely nothing good.

The bartender brought the drinks over. Dumbledore’s had a miraculous lime wedge in it; Sirius could not remember the last time he had seen a lime wedge. It was shrunken and yellower than it was green. “What do you want to talk about,” Sirius asked when the bartender slipped away. Probably it was best to cut right to the chase.

“I heard about the fight, in Poughkeepsie — ”

“That was weeks ago.”

“I know. At first I was surprised — shocked, even — that you would venture so far South, but — ”

_You’ve changed_ , was what hung in the air, unspoken. Indeed Sirius thought he had, many times over.

“There are plans in motion to drive the Lestranges off the Newburgh Bridge,” Sirius said, because Dumbledore certainly knew about them. “Poughkeepsie was a first foothold. And a dry run.”

“Dangerous.”

“Everything is, Albus, please. What do you really want to talk about?”

Dumbledore looked him direct in the eyes and Sirius remembered the old man was an accomplished Leglimancer. He’d never been all that good at Occluding (his failure at that particular variety of magic was how he’d gotten found out to begin with) but he drew walls up anyway, walls around the secret pieces of the war as they had been fighting it since the Order’s dissolution, walls around the contents of his dreams, walls around the cottage on the island on the lake to the North and who lived in it —

Instead of reading his mind the old man reached inside his cloak and slid across the bar toward Sirius a photograph. It was blurryish but demonstrably real — unmagicked, Sirius could feel it — and the colors were bright, if muted by rain; the green-grey and the orange was vivid, and lightning struck a violent slicing bolt across the gloss of it, out of the angry violet sky into a hollow unseen.

\--

At the cottage on the island on the lake Remus answered the door with his wand in one hand and a bell in the other and as such out of reflex Sirius jammed his fingers in his ears. Remus was always opening the door with bells and Sirius had never been able to shirk his training enough to get used to it. Especially because there had been several times Remus had opened the door and recognized him and had not put the bell down, rather he had lifted it higher and crooked his wrist and threatened to swing.

He put it down, this time, on the table just inside the door, and Sirius unplugged his ears. “It’s just the Binder,” Remus said; “it would bend you to my will which perhaps would be nice. When are you going to learn to recognize them?”

“Am I not already bent to your will?”

Remus blushed a little, but he looked down. “Just — come inside.”

One of his headaches was coming on and Sirius could tell. It was in the fragile way he buckled the bell back into the bandolier which hung from the inside coat rack beside his cloak and his bright red fleece jacket. The fine tooled leather of it was illustrated in markings not unlike those tattooed on Remus’s hands. They had known each other now for six years and Sirius had not in all that time dared to so much as touch the bandolier. Theoretically the bells could be differentiated by their sizes but they all looked monstrous, even the smallest of them, when held by a necromancer. Which Remus, of course, though reluctantly, was.

Sirius watched him while he took off his boots. He had to snap the bell in so the clapper would be still if the whole equipment was jostled. There was a careful magic to it which was his in signature. In his youth when he rode with his parents’ caravan before the Event he had been trained in spellwork out of the book, the same way Sirius had in his family home in the Boston safe zone.

“I wasn’t expecting you,” Remus said, turning around. His eyes were unfocused-ish but he was smiling a little and so Sirius kissed him. He slipped a hand in Sirius’s back pocket. “I was making tea,” he said, against Sirius’s mouth.

\--

He knew and worried abstractly whenever they were apart that Remus’s headaches were getting worse, though Remus had never communicated as such to him. Chronic pain was customary to lesser necromancers; he had learned this in his initial training and had delighted at the time to the news. Death had to be violated severely to shirk its complete hold on one’s soul, as it had in the case of the Death Lords. Or at least such was the commonly understood theory posited by the scholars of the Order.

Often they were apart. It did not feel like so much of a wrench as it had when they were teenagers. Remus was accomplished at what he did and though he served no master anymore it seemed he felt a kind of sacred imperative. In the end his work made Sirius’s job easier. Where other necromancers rose and walked the dead Remus slept them again. Sent their souls into death and burned the field of vacated corpses.

It had not mattered to Dumbledore nor the rest of the Order higher-ups exactly what kind of necromancer Remus was. The second article in the Order’s charter was _The only good necromancer is a dead necromancer_.

\--

They had tea, and then Remus had to lie down. Sirius sat with him on the couch in the loose comma of his body and rolled a joint. Remus had draped over his eyes a cool cloth he kept in the freezer which smelled vaguely of lavender. When his eyes were covered Sirius could look at him without shyness or propriety. He was thin but not skeletal in the manner of other necromancers and he was very tall (taller than Sirius) and his hair was soft and delicately curled and a rich pale brown but for a single swoop of brittle silver-grey. His face, which was freckled across the bridge of the nose, with darker spatter of birthmarks constellated over his neck and cheek, was creased a little in pain, and his mouth was very red, and his lips just parted though his teeth were clenched. His eyes which were closed and covered Sirius knew were a bright and lovely hazel green like the final rash of summer when some leaves had begun already to turn yellow, and sometimes when you looked deep enough into them death was there, the bridge or the gateway, the fact of its presence like a pulsebeat, and you couldn’t look away. The visible signature of his profession was the manifestation of pale blue tattoos from fingertip to wrist, tightening and loosening in spirals and esoteric runic text. The markings inside his palm had faded with age because he had left his Death Lord’s encampment at age fifteen and since then they had not been refreshed. Yet the rest were vivid and plain as day. Sirius who would fear them on anybody else found that on Remus they were beautiful but he would never say as such to Remus’s face because he knew Remus hated them. Because, mostly, they were a symbol of something else. Under Remus’s clothes he knew there was more indication of the same in the form of very old scars, and he thought it was all beautiful too, all the patchwork of skin that had been reconstructed in a Death Lord’s nightmare barracks, but he would never say it.

“There were a lot of dead on the way up,” Sirius said, licking a seam on the joint. Remus grew pot in the basement, for his head, and tended it mostly with magic he’d learned from a book he’d found in the since-abandoned magic quarter of Albany titled _Magical Cannabis Care_. He used to buy pot but it had become dangerous for him to have any sort of routine at all now that he had enemies of assorted and various factions, including the elders and the more orthodox initiates of the former Order.

“There’s a necromancer somewhere around here,” Remus said. His voice was a low sick rumble. Like, trying to jostle himself where he hurt as little as possible. “Or maybe more than one. Probably in the old town or in Glens Falls. I went looking last time I went out. You know when it happened here it was tourist season. So there are a lot of — inhabitable bodies.”

“I stayed off the highway and out of town so they won’t’ve seen me,” Sirius assured him. He’d seen the dead in the woods’ thick summer shadow, and with their soft decaying faces pressed with a hungry curiosity to the windows of old homes and resorts along the back roads. He had been nervous at first after his training to go anywhere alone, until everything had happened. And after that he realized that even in a large group of wizards one would wind up alone regardless if shit hit the fan, and that even the dead were smart enough not to go after someone smelling like bells or magic unless they were en masse.

“I know you did, Sirius,” Remus said, “because you have more than half a brain.”

“That’s the first time you’ve ever acknowledged that, you know,” Sirius said, lighting the joint. At the sound of the catch and flare Remus lifted the cloth from his eyes, gingerly, squinting in the light, and Sirius pressed it into the gentle curl of his hand. “It means a lot, coming from you.”

They finished the joint together, and Sirius got up and put one of Remus’s old Motown records on; he had taken from houses and shops throughout the region particularly the vinyl he recognized from his parents’ old collection. He rubbed Remus’s back and waited for him to melt enough — for the knot in his head to unravel — to kiss the freckle at the base of his neck. To ease the hem of his shirt up with an almost fragile care and touch the bare skin against-around all the ancient tearing marks, the vivid imperfections, some of which had been lined with ink, in the olden days, to feel his heartbeat, and his bones, and the breath pressing at the bones, and his incredible miraculous warmth, because he remembered like this, the first time he had gotten Remus out of his clothes, and he had touched all the old wounds with a nervous reverence, as though they would bite, and he had asked, knowing the answer, but not sure he wanted to hear it aloud, “How did you survive this?” And Remus had said, “I didn’t.”

\--

Before Remus lived on the lake, he lived in a cabin up a long winding driveway on the side of a mountain. It was to this locale that he brought Sirius, against his own better judgement, he later said, after he had found Sirius unconscious and in fact scarcely clinging to his life, prodded and investigated by a handful of dead, in a parking lot in Saranac Lake. Of the party who had left him there one — Fenwick — had been left beside him, very far gone. Of the dead that had beset them the majority had followed out after the living, waiting for the van they drove to run out of gasoline, which presumably it had, for they were never seen again. The dead had savaged Sirius badly with claws and he still bore the scars up his back but the six in the van pumping fear and life were apparently more seductive.

He had woken up in the cabin in a rabid screaming fear of such intensity that it nearly drowned out the rabid screaming pain, just at the sight of Remus asleep in the rocking chair beside the bed, holding his wand in his tattooed hands. They were both sixteen years old. He was convinced at first he had in fact died and Remus had necromanced him for sinister purposes. He couldn’t do much and it was taking him forever to heal, and he was frightened to leave, though Remus said he would drive him someplace if he wanted.

“I’m on your side,” Remus kept saying, and his eyes were soft and pleading, and he didn't touch his bells, which hung on the coat rack by the door with his cloak and his red fleece. Each night Sirius lay awake staring into the hallway with his eyes wide open until he passed out from exhaustion.

\--

Sirius was from Boston, and Remus was from Buffalo. Separate ends of the former Interstate 90 which segmented Massachusetts and New York’s Southern Tier and then dipped South along the lakes toward Cleveland and Detroit. Remus claimed in his youth to have visited Canada before the border was closed and Sirius thought he recalled having gone once or twice to New York City which now no one living dared unless they had a severe deathwish. The Boston safe zone was established inside the ring of Massachusetts Route 128 one year after reports of the dead walking began to surface; as Sirius remembered he was four or maybe five, and certainly his brother was hardly yet walking. Not long thereafter Remus’s family had left Buffalo in a caravan with three other families which would travel successfully Western New York and Northern Pennsylvania for about five or six years, until in the former Pittsfield, Massachusetts, on a clear Spring day, they were ambushed by necromancers commanding an army of dead under the sway of a lesser Death Lord named Fenrir Greyback.

Sirius fled Boston at age thirteen with cleverly forged paperwork and a group of four friends having broken out of their stuffy magic school in the dead of night and stolen a laundry van. They knew only the most basic spells to distract or sedate the dead which only worked on groups of under three, or so they had been taught by the semi-infirm old witch who taught Defense Against the Dark Arts. They were out to join the Order of the Phoenix about which they had heard only thrilling rumors, but they were so frightened to drive through Western Massachusetts that instead they took Route 93 northwards, and cut through New Hampshire and Vermont on 202 and 9. When they passed perilously close to the Mass border on the final sleepless stretch to Albany none of them so much as dared to breathe. It had been vivid dawn, the wild colors and the decade’s overgrowth almost jarring, and Sirius had watched out the window, the youngest of the group but among the most skilled with magic, and he held his wand in both hands, and there was a spell in the back of his throat just in case, but he had never seen dead before, not in real life.

When he was seventeen he heard in a bar in Troy that the safe zone in Boston had fallen, and he went AWOL from the Order for the first time. He took his bike up to where Remus lived on the side of the mountain and wept in his arms on the threshold though Remus was holding one of his bells. He began to entertain as such at that moment that perhaps he was in love. After a while, it was all a tearful blur, and then they were lying together in Remus’s bed, and Remus was petting his hair, and even the thread of death surfacing far back in his eyes seemed surprised. “I didn’t think,” he said, and his voice was very small, “I didn’t think you would ever come back.”

He had hated Boston and its sanitized quiet and the great wall and the fear-mongering news, and the circulated photocopied pamphlets recruiting magical youth for any number of outside causes with varying degrees of propagandistic rhetoric, and he had hated those people particularly his family who could never seem to fully condemn what had happened and who sometimes said things like “Good riddance.” But now it was all gone.

\--

He remembered at first love had felt to him like a kind of constant electrification. Now it felt like embers in a fire.

\--

The light spread in off the lake into the room and the refraction of the sunlight seemed to ripple on the ceiling. He pressed the heel of his hand into one of the knots at the join of Remus’s neck and shoulder and there was a little sound, high and sweet, in Remus’s exhale.

“Sirius.”

“Mmm.”

“Why did you come here?”

He tried to keep from stopping short and keep his voice from tightening though of course it was of no use. He would have to tell Remus eventually but he had rather hoped they could have a little while before it had to be negotiated. “Well,” he asked, “why do I ever come here?”

“You know that — to beg my forgiveness for something.”

“That was twice — ”

“Three times,” Remus said, he ducked his head into the couch cushions to hide he was smiling a little. “In my memory.”

“I have something,” Sirius went on, “there’s, well, Dumbledore. Something I need to do.”

“I thought you weren’t working for the Order anymore.”

Indeed for the past three years, since Things Had Changed, Sirius had been rather a free agent. He had worked a while for a consulting firm fortifying the Canadian border, and he had worked as part of a contingent driving Death Lords from Southern Vermont with middling success, and of course he had been in the scuffle in Poughkeepsie, and in broadest daylight when most dead feared to tread he had set foot on the Newburgh Bridge. He had not been much further down the Hudson since his childhood and the sight of it, of the river widening, of the almost-ghost of whatever remained to the South, chilled his blood. He had meant to tell Remus about it, but larger things had surfaced.

He ached; Remus’s skin was warm, and the weight of the headache had left his limbs, and he looked — sun-scattered freckles spattered his shoulders. In the summer Sirius knew he would go down to the lake to swim. Most dead things shied from the water.

Sometimes it did feel like it had then — it was an almost screaming shock. There was no one living in this world so good or so beautiful. Who else could have been offered complete command over life and death and shirked it?

“I don’t,” Sirius said; he traced the ridge of Remus’s spine with his thumb and Remus shifted, under him, against him; his eyelashes fluttered, and Sirius forgot for a moment what he had been saying, or that he had been speaking at all. “He came and found me in a bar in Troy.”

Unsaid: my tragic flaw is my susceptibility to guilt. Which you know.

\--

The Order’s headquarters at the time of Sirius’s joining was in Cohoes at the join of the Hudson and Mohawk rivers, in a collection of abandoned warehouses and storefronts protected by magic wards and 24-hour patrols. They were obliged to relocate once a year or so but they stayed in proximity to the Massachusetts border, normally within the sometime confines of the New York state capitol.

Though the Order’s decisions and movements and recruitments were voted upon by all members it was generally understood that the whole endeavor was orchestrated by Albus Dumbledore, who had been headmaster at the distinguished magic college in Conway, Massachusetts, until it became infamous as the site of a massacre by legions of dead under the control of three greater Death Lords including, some said, He Who Must Not Be Named himself. How Dumbledore had escaped from the fray was uncertain and the stuff of legend and rumor. But he had scraped together the Order out of a handful of survivors and like-minded witches and wizards not long after.

Sirius and the runaways from Boston were accepted into the contingent without much questioning, though not a one of them was older than sixteen. On Van Schaick Island, which they were obliged to swim to because the bridges had been bombed out, they slept in abandoned houses and made breakfast together, trading off the responsibility especially in the winter when no one wanted to rise before dawn and turn the propane on and make batch upon batch of oatmeal, especially because none of them dared, at least at first, to leave the island and drive to Albany to loot from the shops, abandoned then for just under a decade, anything with which to to sweeten it.

They were taught complicated spells and ancient-feeling performances which would distract or confuse the dead enough their bodies could be burned and the souls in them chased back toward death. They were taught to duel, or more particularly they were taught to duel with necromancers, and they were taught the sorts of spells one would use to unfocus or silence the effects of a necromancer’s bells, which only worked sometimes. There was a Momentary Deafness spell, and a Shrieking Spell, and a Vibrating Hex, which was considered truly a last resort. They also learned spells that would cut even through leather enforced with most known charms, with the intent that perhaps it would just be easiest to slice a necromancer’s bell bandolier clean off.

When Sirius was fourteen he was sent off on a routine run to a magical commune in Saratoga Springs where the Order frequently refreshed their potions supplies. Among the caravan were his bunkmates James Potter and Peter Pettigrew, who were around his age, but who had grown up homeschooled in magic and basic combat on distant farms. There was even a rumor that James was Canadian, though he was just from Chateaugay.

On the way they were beset by dead in command of a lesser necromancer on an ostentatious matte black motorbike painted with sloppy flames, and in the fray James and Sirius and Peter’s car was separated from the rest of the caravan. With a grace under pressure he had long thought remarkable or perhaps even magical they felled the dead and at last their commander; Peter’s deft spell caught the strap of his bandolier, and James’s well-fired hex dropped the clapper out of the bell he was holding (the Binder), and Sirius felled the man himself with a smart _Sectumsempra_.

As such he inherited the motorbike.

\--

He fixed the flames on it first thing with paints he stole from an old home goods store, and for months in the night when he was not training he worked on it so it would run primarily with magic and require little gasoline, like the rest of the Order’s vehicles. When the work was done he was sent monthly on scouting missions outside the sphere of relative civilization encompassing the capitol district northward to Saratoga. They rode along Route 90 to Utica and Syracuse, Sirius ahead of the scouting van on the bike with a two-way radio having bewitched his own eyes with _aquilamus_ , passing back when he could the locations of wandering dead along the road or suspicious-seeming encampments. He set foot on the shore of Lake Ontario in the former Oswego, squinting across it into the distant haze, before they moved on again toward the high northlands. They were searching for survivors and potential recruits and useful resources and customarily found none of the three. What they did usually find were dangerous places (low vales beset by dead, bodies and shadows and grotesque beings, encampments of lesser necromancers who had painted the symbols of their allegiance upon their tents like hex signs, doors to death left yawning open for purposes careless or sinister, which few of the Order possessed the skill to close) which were marked on the road atlases they used as maps with bright red Xs. On the Order’s massive map of the region back at their headquarters they would sketch out trouble spots according to a meticulously defined legend and if they posed enough of a threat a larger legion would be sent to eliminate the problem or die trying.

The doomed mission whose failure had changed the course of his life entire had been the first time he had been part of a group dispatched to fix a problem rather than simply identify it. There had been encampments of survivors living on islands or flotillas in the high mountain lakes but the Order had lost contact and feared the worst. Dumbledore sent a contingent of eight; Sirius replaced a girl who had been sent a month previous on a stealth mission toward the Massachusetts border and had never returned. The others didn’t speak much to him; at sixteen he was the youngest by far. They all bore tally-mark tattoos inside their wrists delineating how many necromancers they had killed, but they fought ceaselessly over said tallies’ accuracy. Before they had even gotten all the way up Route 9 Sirius was miserable; he had had to leave his motorbike back at headquarters and ride in the van which they would not let him drive.

Lake Placid was so overrun with dead they dared not leave the van to investigate the lakes and the islands so they drove on to Saranac, where they arrived in the late afternoon, and because they required supplies they stopped at a camping goods store in the heart of the old downtown. Knowing the worst was now almost certain they did not speak to one another much. Five went into the store and one rested behind the wheel of the van to close his eyes and Fenwick who was the only one of them it seemed with much patience for Sirius bummed him a cigarette and they sat in the parking lot kicking stones and smoking to diffuse a measure of the anxiety.

The last thing he thought he remembered was the five of them burst forth from the shop pursued by two score of dead at the least. The shocked rumble of the van’s engine cutting. Sometimes he thought he remembered the sound of the dread bells, with which Remus had saved his life. The rest was history.

\--

At first the plan for escape Sirius formulated out of his fear-scrambled mind was relatively plain and simple. He would wait until Remus got sick with whatever dregs death had not yet forfeited, and while he was incapacitated Sirius would kill him, and then he would steal Remus’s car, and probably also his wand and the bells if he could stand to touch them, and he would drive back down to the Order’s headquarters in Troy.

He remained certain that Remus had reanimated him from death because he could not stop dreaming. And when Remus checked the neat and orderly stitches in his back for infection (or so he said) and cast spells against Sirius’s skin that felt eerily warm and pressed poultices of magical herbs inside the soft cotton bandages Sirius felt his stomach curl with something that was not entirely disgust. To be touched by — and so gentle were those hands, hands that held bells he remembered, hands that woke the dead. Hands that made him breakfast and put Motown records on the turntable and hands that gathered, while Sirius watched with a distracted shock from the kitchen window, herbs and vegetables from his garden into a handmade woven basket. There was a gentle and faraway smile on his face in the sun because it was the end of the summer, and outside it was warm and humid, and Sirius could smell the vivid nightshade smell of the tomato plants even from inside. The light through the tree canopy caught prismatic the beads of dew in his wild hair, which even then had borne the swoop of grey.

If you were the thrall and the tool of a Death Lord would you know it? This feeling which felt classifiable as longing seemed a reasonable symptom. Certainly they would never let him back in the Order. They would burn him alive if they saw him and him like this. Every morning when he woke up he pressed his palm over his heart to make sure it was still beating, and he touched with worry the dark sleepless rings under his eyes. He looked himself in the mirror. “I’m dead,” he whispered, and then he said it aloud.

One morning he woke up and went into the kitchen and found Remus lying on the couch in the living room pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes and his palms to his forehead. He had drawn all the shades and closed the windows.

Do it now, said a piece of Sirius’s brain, do it now, do it now, do it now. He stood on the threshold and listened to the ragged breathing. After a moment he watched Remus seem to shrink on himself under a fresher wave of pain. The button at the top of his spine visible above the collar of his shirt hunched and shifted.

Sirius went to the kitchen and ran a bit of cool water onto a washcloth and wrung it out, and with his wand from his pocket he cast the scant few spells he knew for relief and comfort, and then he went back into the living room and knelt at Remus’s side and moved his hands away and pressed the cloth over the furrowed forehead and the closed shifting eyes.

Three days later in the garden Remus kissed him.

\--

They sat at the table in the kitchen and Remus looked at the photograph Dumbledore had given Sirius in the bar in Troy a few days previous. Sirius started to explain — “It’s the, or well, it’s theorized to be — ”

“Every necromancer knows about the lock,” Remus said, passing the photograph back across the table.

“So it is a kind of — like a portal or a door.”

“It’s what the King of Death, He Who Must Not Be Named, what he opened, so that he could become master of death and live forever. I’m sure you know that story,” he said, and Sirius nodded, because everyone did. “Obviously there were unintended consequences. It isn’t so much a door as it allows other doors to be opened. After all I could open a door to death here if I wanted, which I don’t think — he did not want to share power and immortality and command and all of it with, you know, any idiot with bells.”

“Has anyone ever tried to close it?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t think it was quite so literal.”

Sirius sighed. “It’s in Western Mass and highly protected. But Dumbledore is leading a legion against the Death Lords in Pittsfield — tomorrow night. A diversion.”

Remus just looked at him across the table, understanding, and Sirius waited, letting him, aching. At last he said, “If you shut the lock — ”

\--

“Everything that is truly dead will die,” Dumbledore said. His long brittle finger rested still upon the point of lightning.

“Everything that’s — ” Sirius stood up, a reflexive strike, like drawing one’s hand away from a hot stove, and his barstool fell over with a smash against the flagstones. He could feel a kind of berserker wildness drilling up through him as it had in Dumbledore’s presence perhaps a less-than-edifying number of times. Underneath it was a familiar cold and circling maelstrom pit of fear and certainty. “Fuck you,” he said. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you — ”

“I expected Sirius that you might be capable now in your maturity of making a decision for the greater good,” the old man said. He had not so much as risen from his chair, and his voice was not angry. “The fifth article in the charter of the Order — ”

“ _We all must make sacrifices_ ,” Sirius quoted, “yes, I remember, but the Order’s — ”

“Dissolved, yes, I know. A misfortune in which you are not unculpable.”

“You broke your own sacred charter — ”

“I never would have had to if you had stuck to it first,” Dumbledore chided.  
The first article in the charter: _No member of the Order may ever walk in death for any purpose, and should only interact with any dead creature, including any and all necromancers, by banishing their souls to rest and burning their bodies._

When he was eighteen after his second AWOL excursion to visit Remus at the cabin on the side of the mountain Dumbledore had Leglimanced him upon his return. His anger had been a large and black shadowish entity and he seemed like a thunderstorm made into a man and Sirius’s head felt cleaving, like an orange. He realized dimly it was likely he had never really been taught how to occlude for this very purpose.

He pulled the thread of it clean from Sirius’s head — they were sitting together in the loam in the autumn woods, and he was holding Remus’s hands in his hands and he turned them over and traced the lines in the palms and the fading ink marks, followed the vivid spirals up across the back of Remus’s palms and up his wrists where they stopped just past the protruding bone. Remus was watching his face, he could see in his peripheral, with a bright and beautiful unbelieving sort of longing; he would always tell Sirius he never expected him to come back.

Dumbledore had said, “Ah.”

He was weeping without even really knowing he was. The second incursion was expected and despite the excruciating bruisedness of his mind he tried as best he could, impossibly, to keep the memory inside; he played a kind of life-and-death tug-of-war with it, but still Dumbledore grasped it from him hardly trying.

He was on the bike through the flaming dewy autumn, and the sky was grey because at dawn it had rained, and he was climbing switchbacks, and two stumbling dead pursued him, and he didn’t care. He left them behind calling after him hoarsely when he forded a low stream. And then he climbed, gunning the engine, the long sharp driveway so overgrown and thick with trees and shrub sometimes he had to duck his head or swerve to dodge branches dropped in the night’s storm, and when he caught sight of the little red cottage his heart seemed to catch fire and burst inside him like some artful pyrotechnic, and Remus, hearing the bike, had come to the door, holding one of his bells —

“Ah,” said Dumbledore again. “I should have suspected.”

“It’s not — ” It hurt his head even to speak or to move and focus his eyes. He realized this was very likely how Remus felt when he came down with his headaches. “It isn’t how it looks. He doesn’t — ”

“He doesn’t raise the dead? He doesn’t serve a Death Lord?”

“Not anymore.”

“You would believe a word from his — ”

“Yes,” Sirius said, “yes,” sobbing, “of course, yes, I love him.”

The largest, possibly, of all his mistakes.

\--

“Death’s like a river,” Remus said, “and it’s cold and it tugs on and on.”

But he could tell it already from looking in Remus’s eyes.

“There’s nine gates and in each precinct between the gates different things are chained or resting. After the ninth gate — to move past that precinct is to be truly dead. Dead enough that you can’t be called back by a necromancer and put back into a body. But if you were in death, probably the fifth or sixth precinct, you could call like a shade forth to talk to. Does that make sense?”

They were sitting in the living room together in the cottage on the side of the mountain and outside it was raining. Sirius said, “Yes, it does,” but he was looking at Remus’s mouth, and at the wedge of his neck in the collar of his shirt, the ridge of shapely bone and the hollows, in which Sirius had left not an hour previous imprints of the shape of his teeth. His back hurt (it always hurt) but the pain was far away. He felt sick or rabid with love. He no longer suspected he was dead but he did know Remus had certainly reanimated something in him he had not even known was there, let alone sleeping. He took comfort in the seeming fact that he himself seemed to have awakened the same thing in Remus.

“The common dead as they usually manifest have only the barest shred of life enough to move and hunt. Sometimes it’s one human or animal soul divided into several pieces to animate several bodies. All the dead want is to stay in life which they can do by consuming life. Are you still — ” He looked across to Sirius and he was blushing and at just the touch of his eyes Sirius was blushing. “Are you still following?”

“Yes I am,” he said, though he wasn’t, or he was hardly. It was the memory of being naked together not long ago that he was in fact following, in the late summer garden in the fresh chill of the morning, pressing together, shifting, skin wet with dew, and he brought Remus’s palm to his mouth and kissed it, and put two of Remus’s fingers tattooed as they were in threadlike loops in his mouth, and the shocked sound Remus made was like ambrosia. He thought he should ask a question just to show that he was listening. Besides he had been wondering: “How do you use bells to put the dead down?”

“Well it’s just the opposite of how I used to — well, how necromancers use bells to wake them up. I mostly use the Binder and the Walker. And then it’s, you know, some magic, probably the same magic you use — ”

“ _Ignis magnus_ ,” Sirius said, “and _excsilium_ , sometimes, depending…”

“ _Vacatum_ works sometimes,” Remus said, “depending on how may of them there are. Or, there’s a kind of performance, _ad portam_ , return to the gate. But I’ve never done it without bells.”

He said he had been taught as such by Greyback himself, who had taught him to walk in death as soon as his wounds had healed and he was strong enough to keep from being sucked under. He had lost some that way, due to his own impatience, Greyback had said. They were taught the skills to vacate the dead’s animating soul fragments if they became difficult to control or wouldn’t follow orders. Lacking such skills had cost the lives of untrained necromancers, Greyback said. As such Remus had developed inklings. Greyback came to the barracks in which he slept at night with a score of other child necromancers to investigate the progress of his healing with a magnifying glass and meaty hands and a series of itchy spells. He was called upon at last to prove his allegiance and his mettle to Greyback and the other Death Lords by calling forth from death a host of creatures, lesser sendings like the common dead and more complex creations, wraiths of shadow, constructions of multiplicities of bodies possessed by many damaged spirits. He did it; he was twelve years old. The night following his hands were tattooed, and he was given his own set of bells.

(He had not yet told Sirius about any of this, nor about how he’d gotten out, that all would come very much later, and after all it had been only a year or so then since his departure, and it still felt rather raw and tenuous, and Sirius could tell; there were magical wards all over the property, when they walked in the woods or in the garden they tugged at him like tiny strands of twine, but Remus never talked about it.)

\--

When they were nineteen after the Event and the subsequent dissolution of the Order and Sirius’s sudden job- and directionlessness he rode his bike through the mountains in attempt to find Remus and beg forgiveness. He spotted at last after several days Remus’s station wagon parked in a driveway in Tupper Lake and pounded upon the door of the house and called Remus’s name with such passion that a few dead poked their heads out from the woods and from basements and watched with that uncanny curious hunger from the shadows until Sirius noticed them and banished their souls.

When Remus opened the door after perhaps twenty minutes’ humiliating display Sirius knelt at his feet. It felt like he had been crying for hours, or perhaps days, and he had found it difficult for weeks to sleep, and Remus’s lips were pursed so tightly there was no color in them. He was holding the largest of his bells which Sirius had never seen him draw before. This one he recognized, because they had been warned of its particular power in the Order’s training; if Remus rung it the sound would send them both and anything else who heard it deep into the swarming cold river of death. It was called the Sorrowful. Remus's wrist was crooked such that his grip on the bell was a kind of certainty or imminence rather than a threat. Sirius hung his head, _let’s go_ , he thought, _ring it, let’s go_ …

“I need to make some rounds,” Remus said, and his voice was tight and cold. “Will you come with me.”

It was late Spring, and Remus wore his bells over his red fleece jacket, and they hid Sirius’s bike in some brush by the lake and took Remus’s station wagon northeast on Route 3 toward Plattsburgh.

They hardly spoke, and when Sirius tried Remus put the radio on and turned up the static.

Saranac and Lake Placid had been overrun with dead since the destruction of the settlements (probably, Sirius knew, consisting of the reanimated bodies of the residents of those settlements) and as such by the time they passed through there was a verifiable army following the car who Remus peeked at in the rearview mirror with little concern, even when the ranks had reached a number that frankly frightened Sirius. Just past the village of Wilmington on Route 86 Remus pulled into an old resort’s parking lot and undid his seatbelt and stepped out of the car drawing the Walker and the Binder.

Sirius jammed his fingers in his ears but anyway the tones of the bells reached and vibrated his eardrums and it was like clenching a fist around his soul to keep from following — there were scores of dead behind them in the road, perhaps there were more than one hundred, there were more than Sirius had ever seen in one place outside a battle, and Remus in his red fleece and jeans and too-big scuffed-up workboots stepped toward them in the Spring fog around the steaming hood of the car, and Sirius watched them attend to the sound of his will, and then he rung the Walker with the backhanded swing, and all the half-self bodies vacated and fell.

Remus came back to the car buckling his bells back into his bandolier and he rapped on Sirius’s window with the flat of his knuckles. Shell-shockedly Sirius unplugged his ears. “Help me burn them,” Remus said, not a question.

\--

Remus turned the photograph upside down on the table and eyed the back of it as though it would explode. The notes on the reverse side inscribed there in Dumbledore’s spidery hand seemed ancient and haunted.

“One night,” Remus said. “That’s kind of you.”

“It’s,” Sirius tried. “I just found out about the whole thing from Dumbledore this morning.”

“You don’t have to explain it to me.”

He had expected a fight which would’ve been no doubt easier to handle. “I don’t?”

“If it’s as simple — Sirius, to end it all, then you have to do it.” He pressed the moisture out of one eye. “I can show you — there’s a back route up Mount Greylock. The road’s torn up so it’s lesser known and not quite so fortified.”

“Remus — ”

(How can you value yourself so modestly that you won’t fight the seeming guillotine inevitability of your own — but indeed perhaps this wasn’t death, and indeed Remus had no fear of death, and as such perhaps this was a sort of final permission, a release, a lifting of bonds — perhaps [it pained him to think it] it had been only his love for Sirius which had kept Remus upon this earth.)

“The lock’s at the very top, you know, or so they say, but they only allowed the greatest of the Death Lords up there; I don’t think — they didn’t let Greyback more than halfway up. Despite the similarity of the names. And they would say — they would say that he lives there, the spirit, the lich king himself.”

Dumbledore had told him the “portal” as he called it was at the summit of Mount Greylock but had mentioned positively nothing else. “Bit of a death trip,” Sirius said, trying and failing for lightness, “isn’t it?”

“Everything’s a fucking literal death trip.”

They had walked in death together not long after the Event in search of pockets to close and necromancers to ensnare, and because Remus had to repair the Walker, his second favorite of his bells, which necessitated a bit of magical welding in the dim precinct between the third and fourth gates. Sirius who had never set foot there before found the place intolerable and the current seductive and he felt very near hallucinating while he stood over Remus in the semidarkness to protect him as he drew what energy was necessary from that place into his wand and into the cracked metal; every ripple in the endless river seemed to have some creature behind it. When they came out of it Sirius felt his whole body shiver violently toward the sun and he nearly kissed the earth. But after that he found he noticed there were shreds of the cold river of death in everything. He wondered if it had always been as such or if it was simply another function of the opening of the lock.

\--

He was sent on a scouting mission along the Massachusetts border on Route 22 when he was eighteen, just before it all, and he felt galvanized by his love, and by his certainty, and by what he was coming to understand as the truth, which was that good and evil were not so staunchly defined as he had been taught since his very youth, but that rather much was grey. The mission was undertaken simply to plot the edge of reasonable living human safety. Dumbledore and the higher-ups in the Order wanted to know exactly the longitude at which the Death Lords of the Berkshires claimed territory.

It was summer then and the air smelled like dregs of burning. Like a forest fire or like sitting heat. Thunderclouds brewed to the east but there was no rain. He was uncertain when there had last been rain — most common dead could not stand water and it was known to frustrate even the greater Death Lords and as such it was likely most employed powerful meteoromancers — but certainly for years now there had been darkness. The dead did their work under darkness. Strong sun flayed their skin from their bones. And Remus had spoken of the darkness.

He remembered the legends and the history and the books he had read in second-year History of Magic when he was at school in Boston about the Indian wars and the trials of witches and all the seething history of hauntedness in this far country and it seemed to him nothing much had changed. All territory belonging to death and bones would return to death and bones. Remus had said Greyback had always told him this was the rightful order of things reasserting itself at last. It was right for those who had conquered death, who had beaten and chained and mastered death, to reign over those who conformed unquestioningly to its directive.

They rode almost silently under the weight of spells for quietude and spells that would warn them if they were approached. Sirius was feeling hardly lucid with the memory of Remus’s hands on him and he was plotting already the next juncture at which he could conceivably go AWOL, God, he was young, wild with youth, sick with youth, with certainty that he was so unkillable death would forfeit him as soon as it touched him. As though death had not been so tortured and violated in that very shred of earth as to be tender still and starved and vengeful.

\--

The clouds sat in the heavy shadow of the hills easterly and the sun so yellow as to bleach the grass and pale the foliage cast a vivid white eye upon the asphalt where it dried and blackened the blood that had been shed there. The hills were thick and concealed much. Very little that had been buried remained as such. And the silence (eternity of silence) was its own instrumental like a bell ceaselessly ringing whose necromantic significance was as yet unknown.

The world was not dead so much as it had always been dead, or its lifeness was of a different kind, and it moved so slowly that it could not be determined to be true.

\--

Two weeks after Dumbledore discovered from Sirius’s memories where Remus lived, he came to the barracks where Sirius slept to read his mind again. It was still fragile and hurting from the initial incursion and he had spent the interim days in feverish nightmare and thus when Dumbledore reached for a foothold again it felt as though he had reached with claws into an open wound.

He filtered through the memories as a photo album or deck of cards and at least he glossed over all the salacious material quickly (eg. what Remus looked like naked like some secret scraped-clean sheaf of stone cut smooth by a glacier and carven upon in runes by ancient druids, what he looked like with his face still and composed in spreading wash of shocked ecstasy, the current of death that hummed beyond his heavy-lidded eyes like a generator in the basement) and he looked with excruciating closeness at the way Remus treated his bells, and which handles were most polished with use, and when he told Sirius about his rounds through the park in search of dead to destroy, when he taught Sirius banishment spells he hadn’t known, and when he laughed and smiled and his face turned bright, and when he spoke about leaving Greyback’s encampment, vacating and burning the dead in the paddocks, hot-wiring a car in North Adams, and driving through the night and the next morning possessed by terror until he realized after a week casting desperate wards around the most remote and hidden cottage he could find in his searching that they were not coming after him.

“Ah,” said Dumbledore when he pulled back, but Sirius could hardly hear it, because the pain in his head was subdividing his entire soul. “Stop that,” said the old man, “it doesn’t hurt that much.”

When he thought about it later on after the whole thing happened it was of little wonder Dumbledore seemed to have switched off whatever controls in his brain were supposed to indicate the necessary employment of empathy. He had decided that much was necessary in the service of the greater good and as such individual misery was but an insect squashed upon the windscreen of progress.

“I’ll vet him for the Order,” he told Sirius, once Sirius’s ears stopped ringing. “Perhaps it is indeed time we started thinking about about revising article two.”

Sirius wrote to Remus and posited that perhaps they should run away together. _We are of the unique skill set between the two of us to start our own caravan don’t you think? We could try to cross the border (I may have some connections) and/or we could try for the West, like old times._

They met — it was the first weekend that felt like winter — in a cemetery in the vivid wasteland between Schenectady and Utica. Remus wore a sweater under his fleece and he wore thin gloves knit with magic that were tearing at the thumb and his nose was pink with cold and he had packed in the trunk of his car in a plethora of mismatched cardboard boxes most of his earthly possessions and when he saw Sirius he smiled a warm and hopeful secret smile and Sirius loved him. Then death moved in his eyes.

The creature which fought itself free from nowhere was like no dead thing Sirius had ever seen before and it seemed like a physical manifestation of the wrongness of their transgression against the larger bodies to whom they had sworn allegiance. It was twice Sirius’s height and broad at the shoulders yet narrow at the waist and it was humanish but its face constituted only shrunken almost-blind eyes and a wide stretching smiling mouth with concentric rings of teeth like an eel’s. Its arms were long and nearly elastic and its claws were the length of Sirius’s hand and curled in points and when it reached for them he heard the rattle and rasp of its infernal and impossible breathing.

It was Greyback’s creature. The man himself and his legion of dead and necromancers awaited them in the far clearing.

\--

\--

“I am sure you have wondered why I turned over your beloved reluctant zombie lord to begin with,” Dumbledore said in the bar in Troy. His smile was cold and brittle as glass. “The location of the lock has been of great interest to me since my days at Conway College. You do know He Who Must Not Be Named was a student there, very briefly, studying the nature of magic users’ relationships to death. But this was decades ago.”

“It was — a trade for information.”

“Yes, of course. Greyback was searching for a foothold among the greater Death Lords, the Lestranges, the Notts, you know the pedigree. It did not behoove him that a child he had turned had grown up to undermine his work. With the very bells Greyback had given him, to boot.”

Dumbledore waved the bartender over and ordered a refill on his gin and tonic. “Another for you, Sirius?”

He chose not to dignify the question with a response.

“You know I was very impressed with both of you, that you survived.”

Remus had awoken all the dead he could draw from the graveyard beneath their feet (he had not risen the dead since his departure from Greyback’s encampment, and he had sworn he would never do it again), and he had summoned forth from death six or so swarming masses of shadows like clouds of insects, and though his fingers had hovered above the largest and most sorrowful of the bells he had drawn the Binder and the Walker. He would not look at Sirius. The creatures arisen from the ground were hardly more than skeletal though some bore flesh or fragments of clothing. Through the momentary deafness spell he quickly cast Sirius could see but could not hear the way Remus drove the dead forward like a herd of stumbling cattle stepping in time to the gestural waltz of the bells ringing.

It had shocked Dumbledore when Sirius (and his motorbike) showed up on the steps of the Order’s Rensselaer headquarters again in two days’ time, hysterically weeping (Sirius had tried to explain but Remus, eyes brimming with angry and frustrated and horrified tears, had screamed at him a whole series of variations on What Were You Thinking and How Could You and finally threatened him with the Thinker which might’ve erased all his memories indiscriminately like a sort of badly levied Oblivate, but instead he had just hexed Sirius with nosebleeds and sped away in the station wagon), and it had shocked the Order as a whole when Sirius was unshy about the fact that Dumbledore had not only set him up for certain death but had been in collusion on the subject with Greyback.

“Of course the fact that you did indeed not only survive but — how many of his lesser necromancers did our charming friend — ”

“Six.”

“Yes, that he chained six of Greyback’s necromancers beyond the seventh gate,” Dumbledore went on, “where they still rest to this day. Anyway of course on account of that Greyback didn’t exactly hold up his end of the bargain and so I was obliged to keep searching through — unsavory channels, for information about the exact functionality and location of the lock. It indeed cost me many of my allies and a great deal of my time and dignity but I do not regret it. Nothing is more important to our cause than the sealing of this lock, do you understand?”

“Of course I understand.”

“If it is closed it will all be over. Every last bit of it. This is about — the resurgence of the human race.”

If the lock had been opened once it could be opened again, Sirius knew it, and it would never be over, now that it had started.

“You are in a unique position, Sirius; you were always my best operative, and this is — entirely unfacetiously, this is likely to be the best opportunity any of us will ever get to bring back the living world.”

\--

The living world. He had never really known the living world. Had there ever been a living world?

\--

“Why do you trust him this time,” Remus asked, “after all the other times?”

They made pasta to eat together, with sauce sourced directly from the heirloom tomatoes and onions and basil in Remus’s garden, and homemade noodles he had made whilst snowed in during the long winter, as though nothing were different, as though they had a week, or longer, as though they had any time left at all.

“I’m not sure I do trust him,” Sirius said. “But that you — that you know it’s real — ”

“We always used to watch the lightning strike up there,” Remus said, “from the barracks.”

“This is the only thing he’s ever cared about. He’s done every shitty thing he’s ever done to find this place.”

“And to find out how to close it.”

“I have this theory he inadvertently taught the King of Death how to open it, as a pure hypothetical, at Conway College.”

“My parents used to talk about that place,” Remus said. His father had been a teacher of Defensive Magic at a school in Cheektowaga, and he had been among the first to develop a pamphlet of hexes and curses specifically effectual against the dead, which apparently was still in use in Western New York. “My dad said that was always where his kids with the biggest and darkest and strangest ideas went for an advanced degree. Everyone else just went to the Magical Studies department at SUNY Buffalo, or the stoners went to New Paltz.”

“So you would’ve gone — ”

“Yes, Sirius, to New Paltz, to study magical theory of psychoactive flora, you’ve said before.”

Remus was smiling a little in the corner of his mouth turned away from Sirius and watching his tattooed hands cut mushrooms — was there another such true glimpse he would ever get of the way the living world should be? They lived together in the cottage on the island on the lake and they grew tomatoes in the garden and pot in the basement and they had memorized the mushroom spots along the shore and perhaps they had chickens, and they fished the lake for trout in the morning fog from the paint-chipping rowboat, and they listened to the Motown records with the windows thrown open, and they watched the thunderstorms coming up the lake from the mountains.

“How are you going to close it,” Remus asked.

“Spellwork,” Sirius said, “there’s a series, the old man taught me.”

“It would be easier with bells. Probably the Binder and the Sleeper.”

“I can’t — ”

“Well you should’ve listened to me when I offered to teach you how to use bells like, four years ago.”

Sirius had touched precisely one, once, when they were in death together, and Remus had given him the smallest one, the Sleeper, which was the easiest to ring with the fewest possible consequences, and touching the polished bone handle he had felt the sort of otherworldly (death-worldly) feral magic rush through him like a direct injection to the vein; it had been almost freeing, a forfeiture and a command simultaneously, and he was both relieved and loath to let go of the thing when they walked out of the river and Remus took it back again. It was the least powerful of all the bells but to hold it — he was not sure he could wear the bandolier without succumbing. Remus was stronger than him, this he knew, in his soul and his convictions, despite what appeared true of most other necromancers. He recalled his certainty — who else could have been given complete command over life and death and shirked it?

Remus put a record on, and they opened all the windows and went and sat out on the lawn to eat, and the soft wind lapped ripples off the lake at the rocks around the shore and the delicate wedge of beach. When he had finished eating Sirius lay down in the thin grass and put his head in Remus’s lap and closed his eyes, and after a moment he felt Remus’s hands in his hair, and at his shoulder, the sort of uncanny softness of his touch, despite his hands, despite his ragged fingernails and his calluses, hands which held bells et cetera… Inside the stereo was playing Remus’s mother’s favorite song, by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles; I don’t like you but I love you, seems that I’m always thinking of you, though you treat me badly I love you madly, you really got a hold on me…

\--

Naked in the dirt in the garden, they were sixteen, he asked Remus, “Was I dead? When you found me?”

He was beginning at last to be certain he had not been — that this feeling was something else. Now simply he was curious about logistics. How would it be done — how had it been done? Animating corpses with bells and magically altered souls was a process he could begin to comprehend; resurrection in Remus’s case, to a sort of convincing facsimile of lifeness, still boggled him. For a few days he had simply refused to believe it were true and the whole construct had been a lie, which was pretty to think, but all the scars on Remus’s torso he had been pressing his open mouth and tongue and teeth to not fifteen minutes previous could not have been anything less than killing blows.

Remus had sat up and put his shirt back on, though it stuck against his belly, and there was dirt smudged on his cheek and in his hair were flecks of mica and dew which caught the fading light. Angel, Sirius thought, pure sense memory; he put his hand inside Remus’s thigh to feel his warmth and heartbeat.

“Well, you were hanging onto your life, like, by your fingernails. So I pinned it, I sort of held it in you, with magic. The first afternoon I thought I would have to use the Waker to make it stick. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that, or that you would want me to do that. But you — you wanted to be alive. So by midnight I didn’t have to hold it anymore.” He was blushing a little high across his cheekbones but it was unclear to Sirius whether he was embarrassed remembering or whether it was residual from their earlier activity. “I don’t bring back the dead anymore. That was the first thing I swore not to do again.”

He didn’t gather the courage to ask Remus how his existence was physically possible until the occasion of their first reunion, the first time he had gone AWOL from the Order, just after the fall of Boston, when he had gone to the cottage and wept on the threshold and they had gone inside and to the bedroom where Remus had nursed him back to life again the summer previous; it was late spring and the cold and the damp stuck in the corners, and very quickly and seemingly out of either of their control, like a rolling stone, Sirius thought, in a rhythm he couldn’t place, their sexual repertoire (which in the previous summer had consisted mostly of rubbing, like flint and tinder, and the single occasion the evening before his departure where Sirius had dared to put Remus’s cock in his mouth for all of five seconds) expanded by palpable degrees. It wasn’t so much good as it was intense and sloppy with the tone of an emotional necessity, like a good cry or something, or a long embrace, purging and exhausting and very right.

Afterward they lay together in the bed; it wasn’t yet noon, and the birds outside were singing, and he was running his fingers contemplatively through the soft damp curls at the nape of Remus’s neck. He felt awed into stillness and certain for the first time in his life of the exact sensation of love. This was the feeling they were supposed to ride into battle for. The sacredest of the sacred, holiest of holies, the most profound and sacrosanct of relics, whose worship proved one’s lifeness; it was the antithesis of death, or perhaps the only certainty — the only human possibility — that could withstand death. He would have martyred himself for it then gladly. For this feeling which was that he could feel Remus’s heartbeat just offset with his own heartbeat and in the space between was a silence with a name.

“How does it happen,” Sirius asked, even his voice felt raw. “How did he bring you back?”

Unsaid: to life; for me.

“With the Waker,” Remus said, as though it were everyday and commonplace, which for him perhaps it had been, “with a lot of very focused magic and special work in death. He would have necromancers hold particular souls in the first precinct against depreciation until their bodies could be repaired enough to hold them again. That’s probably what happened to me. I don’t remember it, obviously.”

There were legends and sayings Sirius had heard in his Order training about the metaphysical mandates connecting lesser necromancers to their Death Lords: dreams and compulsions, visions, bindings, but Remus never spoke about these, and after a while Sirius figured either they didn’t exist at all, or he had found a way to break them. Neither of which would have surprised him.

It was miraculous — utterly impossible and miraculous — to lie in bed past two in the afternoon listening to the spring rain on the tin roof and to touch each other and they way they fit in each other’s arms and the soft vivid darkness like the fan of flesh inside a mushroom, of Remus’s eyelashes against his skin —

\--

The afternoon outside of Wilmington, in the vivid fog, they burned the still field of dead with a flash of blue-white fire, corralling the flames with magic, and Remus’s jaw was set very tightly. They got in the car again in silence when the deed was done and drove back to Tupper Lake rounding up behind the car still more dead like doomed cowboys conducting some kind of reverse cattle drive, and when they were near to town Remus pulled off the road and banished them all again, then they burnt the still corpses and vanished the ash. The spring rain seemed very close and almost pregnant with inevitability yet it had hovered blackly all day over the distant mountains.

Inside the apartment where Remus was living he grabbed Sirius by the collar and kissed him angrily. As though he hated or feared himself for it which perhaps he did. As though of all the possessors he had ever shaken this one he could not — would not. They went to bed, fucked desperately; it felt wrong to call it Making Love, which heretofore had been the poetic and emotional referent Sirius had applied (naively, he was realizing) to similar circumstances. When Remus took Sirius inside after what seemed like six hours’ pointed and vengeful teasing Sirius felt swallowed, possessed, eaten up by pieces into the heart of darkness, and when he reached to touch Remus, to hold the jutting bolts of his hips as he sometimes dared, Remus batted his hands away. It was like a fight with a thread of pleasure in it they chased between the violence, and by the end of it they had drawn each other’s blood.

He woke with dreams in the night to piss and in the shreds of broken mirror he could distinguish the mouth bruises at his neck and collar and the stinging scrapes of Remus’s ragged fingernails inlaid red against the skin of his back cryptically intersecting the old scars left by the long-ago dead. His hair was tangled and wild and he felt bruised inside and out and his head felt spinning behind his eyes with exhaustion, but he doubted that when he went to the bed again he would be able to sleep.

In the bedroom when he returned Remus was awake and watching him, and his eyes were sleepy, and his skin was like a moth-eaten tapestry in the moonlight through the window. It was not yet late enough in the spring for crickets and sometimes birdcalls or the brittle bleating screams of the dead would intercut the night silence but more often than not the quietude was pure and still as water. “Will you forgive me,” Sirius said; it felt drawn out, like blood with leeches, “please, please for heaven’s sake will you forgive me.”

Remus had propped himself up on his elbows. “I have already,” he said.

He realized if Remus had not forgiven him perhaps he would be dead. At least if it had happened that way Remus certainly would’ve banished his soul beyond the ninth gate to prevent it from being brought back in at least seven undead corpses.

“You want everything to be how it suits you,” Remus went on. “Sometimes I think you’re convinced everything’s going to pan out just as you want.”

Won’t it, he almost said.

“But I love you,” Remus said, “fuck you. I love you. You’re so naive.”

\--

The weight of sunset started shoving at them both, and they left the dirty dishes in the sink, and kissed, deeply, in the kitchen, rocking together in a kind of abstract dance. In his bedroom upstairs Remus had half a joint in an ashtray on his night table, which he had set atop a pile of old magazines, and they shared it, undressing one another in the fading dregs of yellow-gold light off the lake and the hills, and he tasted the salt-taste of Remus’s skin, the fact of his bones, the swan-bend of his neck, his sun freckles, memorizing, mapping what could not be lost, but he was telling himself on endless mantra with his own pathetic self-convincing certainty, this cannot — must not — be the end. The heat of the last light — the words, like some secret runic history, he swallowed from Remus’s bare mouth.

It was so dusk it was nearly night and they had thrown the pillows and the blankets from the bed when Sirius half-lay back against the headboard and Remus sat slowly in his lap, taking him inside, showing with excessive sinuous finesse exactly how delicately all the machinery of him could shift. At last he rested, back against Sirius’s chest, with a kind of soft and fulfilled exhale, not quite a sigh, though Sirius could feel his impossible heartbeat pounding on the door, and the growing rapidness of his breath, and he wrapped his arms around the narrow torso tightly, splaying one palm at Remus’s belly and the second at his collar just beneath his neck, where his heartbeat felt and sounded like thunderstorm rain falling upon the roof. The artful vaulted breastplate of ribs which had been smashed in when he was young, then reconstructed with necromantic magic, blown in like a blacksmith’s bellows, opened for the provision of what remained of his life.

“You know death as can be accessed is just like, a waiting room, for what’s beyond,” Remus said, and his voice rumbled inside him, and Sirius felt it, and held him tighter, “and past the tenth precinct is a sort of final bridge. From which there is no coming back.”

Sirius pressed his face against Remus’s neck and shoulder, and Remus reached and carded his fingers through Sirius’s hair. They were breathing not the same breath but almost and in the space between their symphonic heartbeats was a silence with a name and he could feel intimately in his very veins like a kind of gilded thread, every infinitesimal shift Remus made around him, opening for him, like a door into somewhere else —

Every time he made this allowance it awed Sirius, like every apparition of great beauty he was allowed to witness but could not touch, sunsets and spreading sheaves of stars and the mountains blushing death in autumn, the blue mornings after blizzards, thunderclouds knotting and compiling; he was no stranger to the devoured-alive feeling of the sublime, but this seemed its purest and truest manifestation, because it was also the vivid and undeserved proof of Remus’s trust in him.

“They would say,” Remus went on, and his voice was dissolving into breath, he shifted, almost rocking, searching, “you know, Sirius, the King of Death, in his — he was looking for a way. For another lock. But I don’t know that one exists. I like to think there’s some, some region of death that’s inviolable.”

“There has to be, there has to be peace, rest — somewhere…”

“Somewhere.”

Their bare legs tangled, and his skin felt burning, and Remus’s heartbeat fluttered against his hand, like a trapped bird.

“I’ll be,” Remus said, “wherever it is. I’ll look for you.”

“Fuck,” Sirius said, heart schisming, “don’t say — ”

“Why else would you come here and say all this?” he whispered, pressing back, his mouth dropped open, and his voice was almost gone, “If it wasn’t one last time?”

\--

Some of the ways death had come to work were obvious, and they were new and necessitated negotiation, but other ways were invisible, or at least invisible unless you cared to look very closely, and thus perhaps they had been as such forever.

The winters and the summers felt short. Things burst and grew in explosive verdant ecstasy, and then they died, but they came back to life again, after the cold season. They pressed up even through the frozen ground, and the vivid green blush came to the high country and the lowlands about the rivers and the lakes. This world was like a child’s palette of bright primary colors — blue, green, yellow, red, grey. No black and white — only grey. It had been just over fifteen years since the abandonment of much of this territory and already it had circluded — it had swallowed, overgrown, devoured, digested with moss and ivy and mushrooms — much evidence that at one time it had been populated by the living at all. It felt haunted with its own vengeful presence; it felt much like being with Remus had, in the amorphous days when Sirius was not yet sure if he had truly been forgiven.

Bridges fell, and dams. At night sometimes he could hear wolves howling. In the spring and fall sometimes so many birds migrated overhead their tight runic formations blocked out the sun. Every other piece of the living world was still living, and living perhaps more than it had since its initial colonization. Such a fact did not escape him.

It also did not escape him that he felt most alive in Remus’s company even if they were just swimming or walking together in the woods or driving and rounding up dead to banish or if they were sitting together silently at the kitchen table reading old magazines, and sometimes it felt like Remus was more alive than he himself was, or than anybody he had ever met, though of course when the bare facts were considered simply it could not be true.

Life and death these days were quantifiable and had infinite variants. Spring to summer to autumn to winter and back around again. Things could live that should not have, if it could be called living.

They did not speak about the nature of the great gulf between them, which was the bridge between the worlds — yet he no longer thought of it as a chasm between rightness and wrongness, which had been his first indication that he had shirked all the brutal and blinded mythmaking of his Order training. Love was not particular to the living. Nor was pain, nor was hope.

“If you ever die,” Remus had told him once, while they walked in death together, in the cold river that sapped the warmth and the energy and the will from you and yet did not so much as feel wet, and Remus had forgiven him then or so he said, but there was a raw edge to how he treated Sirius, which perhaps he had not lost so much as Sirius had learned its vocabulary, “run to the end of it. Just run.”

\--

In bed in the dregs of moon their limbs were twined together in the pale light, and Remus said, “I can teach you how to talk to me. When I’m really dead.”

Sirius felt like he had been crying for weeks or perhaps for months except he had not been crying at all.

“You can fold — ” He was holding Sirius’s face in his hands, which were soft but callused, and the nails were bitten, and he passed his thumbs over Sirius’s cheekbones, and then through his hair, against his ears and his neck, ragged against his scalp, and his shoulders, memorizing by feeling, like a blind person, and his voice was like a whisper; it was sweet and warm, and very certain, “you’ll have to go into death — deep, to the fifth precinct, or perhaps the sixth. You make a paper boat, and you put a drop of blood on the bow of it, and put it in the water, and say my name, and it’ll get me. Or I guess the realest piece of me that can come back from past the ninth gate. It’s like — only a little more being than a ghost.”

“This even — you assume that I can really do it.”

“Of course you can really do it. This is only the second deadliest thing he’s made you do.”

“What was the first?”

“You know what the first was.” His smile was hesitant and still raw. “You can only do it — you can only send the boat seven times a decade. Otherwise it’s — well it wants more than blood.”

“Will it even work, though, if the lock is closed?”

Remus’s face clouded, and his brow furrowed. They were so close Sirius could taste his breath, his skin and sweat, on his tongue. The not-forgotten taste of their first kiss in the garden at the cottage on the side of the mountain, like sun, and tomatoes. Certainly the mountains by now had reclaimed it. “I suppose it won’t,” he said, and he looked away. His eyelashes were fluttering, and his hands on Sirius’s back had stilled.

“There has to be a way,” Sirius said.

“What, to talk? There’ll be no bridge anymore between this world and death.”

Remus wouldn’t call it _the living world_.

“If this works, Sirius, there won’t be exceptions. Unless someone opens it again. Which won’t be — I mean, our current knowledge of death will die out with necromancers. Whoever does it next will want to refine it which will take a lot of study. By which point you and I will be long beyond the tenth precinct.”

“Does it just keep going after that?”

“I don’t know. It flips — it changes how it looks and feels. It’s like standing in the lake on a clear night. The stars…”

“It’s — ”

“ — beautiful, yes.”

He hadn’t meant to say that, but he didn’t want to correct Remus, either, because he was almost right. He didn’t think he could bear to speak about death anymore. If every joy he had ever known was a function of this wasteland what kind of demon listeneise had once been, or could be again? He didn’t even remember what it had been like, before; he didn’t want to remember, he had hated that life, it had all been a sort of vacant and blindered nothing, existence behind a very literal wall, until the shock of truth, purest truth; he woke up in the cottage on the side of the mountain, and his back hurt, and he had forgotten how he had arrived there, and in the chair beside his bed asleep in a shaft of sun was a boy necromancer —

He took Remus’s hands by the wrists feeling the heartbeat in the thick vein and kissed the palms where the ink marks were fading with age, then the back of his hands and the flat of his knuckles. A series of uneven rings around each of his fingers suggested death’s nine gates, and the current of the river.

Remus traced Sirius’s lower lip with his thumb until Sirius bit the callused pad of it. “I love you,” Remus said. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

When they made love again, slower this time, and face to face, the moon passed in the window and it threw a shifting underwater light off the lake into the room, onto Remus’s skin, like a thin veil of pale cotton; they kissed in a sort of tender tidal movement, and their hands intertwined tightly on the pillow behind Remus’s head, and Sirius thought, to hell with them all, to hell with all of it… to hell with the other world, the lost world, the living-ish world differentiated from this one only by the number and the variety of rules that could be ascribed to death. After all how different could that place be — and how desirable could it be, if in it he could not have this?

\--

They dozed together, drifting, in the movement of the moon and the stars, sometimes he watched the light shift on Remus’s face and the rising and the falling of his chest and wondered if he was dreaming. He woke once to find himself entrapped fully in Remus’s arms, and he contemplated extracting himself and leaving then, so as not to have to speak to him in the first blush of daylight, but instead he watched the lake, the stillness and the silence; he listened to the birdcalls and the crickets and far away the wolves, and he had Remus’s mother’s song stuck in his head, though you treat me badly I love you madly, you really got a hold on me…

“I can’t do it,” he said, aloud, fracturing, “Remus, I can’t do it.”

“Then I will,” Remus said, against his bones. “If you won’t, I will.”

\--

“I have the same dream,” Remus told him, “over and over…”

\--

He woke at dawn alone in the bed. Remus was in the kitchen making sandwiches and coffee and at the sight of him Sirius sat down at the table and wept.

“Stop that,” Remus said, “you massive pathetic idiot.”

But he had been crying not so long ago and his eyes were bright and red in the corners, when he turned around.

“It’ll be safer if you come from the North,” he said, “through Vermont.” He had brought out the atlas he kept of the region marked up with his own cryptic legend delineating dangerous spots and roadblocks and bridge collapses and stuffed full of new pages upon which he had traced counties and made notes in his largely illegible handwriting. “There are only two roads up the mountain and the north one — a car couldn’t pass it, but I think your bike could. There’ll be — I don't think anything worse than common dead, on the north road.” He had made a list of highway routes he gave to Sirius. “Have you ever been in Western Mass before?”

“I’ve been on the borders but not really.”

“Well it feels like — you can feel the rift and the closeness of it all. Like it’s right beneath your feet.” He poured the coffee into chipped mugs and allocated them each a bit of precious sugar and then he sat beside Sirius at the table as he pored over the atlas and the list of routes. “You should just bring me with you.”

“No,” Sirius said, instantly, “no, I — ”

I cannot bear to watch you die, was the only true answer, which he couldn’t say aloud.

“If I can’t do it, Remus, you have to do it, like you said.”

Remus crossed his arms over his chest. There was a hickey on his neck, just inside his t-shirt collar, a bright crepuscular violet-red bruise. “You had better not come back here, then,” he said. “Never. I’d better not see you alive again.”

They had coffee at the table, and toast with homemade jam. Remus’s hair smelled like the lake. “You’ll want to skirt Williamstown,” he said, “there’s an encampment of lesser necromancers in the old college. Do not get into North Adams no matter what you do. The road’s on the edge of town — Notch Road, off the old Route 2.”

“Shouldn’t I — ”

“Well of course you should stay off Route 2. The Death Lords called it the King’s Highway. There’s a back road — ” he indicated it with a slender finger — “here. And here — ” he drug it, the ragged nail, along the map — “is where I used to live.”

He indicated a sharpish bend in the highway outside of North Adams. He had told Sirius years previous that all Greyback’s necromancers had slept in barracks constituted from the mostly burnt remnants of an old motel, and they had practiced walking in death, and raising the dead, in a churchyard cemetery outside town.

“Death feels like — you could turn a corner and then it’s there. And every day and night you could see lightning striking atop the mountain. Though perhaps it won’t feel that way for you.”

When they had finished he stood and waited until Sirius stood and they put the dishes in the sink with the dishes from the night previous and then Remus walked him to the door. Close behind him, at his very heels. He would go inside once Sirius left and wash those dishes though he knew very well that very evening if all went accordingly he would slip into the other world forever.

They kissed on the threshold, chastely, tasting of jam, and he grasped Remus’s shoulders, feeling the bones and breath, his very realness, and the way he shifted. The impossible miraculous heartbeat beneath his jaw. “Don’t come back,” Remus said; he was trying to keep from weeping. “Don’t — promise me you’ll never come back.”

What would happen, Sirius thought, in a vivid guilty flash, what would happen to his body, when the lock closed? The reified life would come out of it; such was certain. Would there be a corpse, and if there was could he bury it, in the garden? Would it be blown apart like so much dust by the scouring wind? Remus would not want to be buried, he thought, logically; burial, as they had seen in the interim years, was grievously impermanent.

“If you come back,” Remus said, “I will be at the door with the Sorrowful and I will ring it this time.”

We’ll end up in the same place together anyway, Sirius did not say. “I won’t,” he said instead, “I won’t come back.”

“Promise me.”

“I promise.”

He moved from their embrace. Remus’s eyes were bright and pale and death echoed beyond them. The sort of eternal whispered call. A pay telephone at one of the old highway rest stations off its hook and endlessly ringing. “I love you,” Remus said. “You make me feel like — I forget life hurts.”

Sirius felt he perhaps could’ve said the same but didn’t dare, lest he weep again. He climbed Remus’s paint-chipping rowboat and rowed toward shore as Remus watched from the door of his house, and the tomato plants were dying, and every pull of water past the oars felt like stretching something tighter. Something like a strip of fabric that would flex only so far before it tore, and the further he got the more it felt like tearing, or like very soon it would snap and spring back on him. There was no going back and he knew it — it seemed likely Remus was standing in the doorway mostly to make sure he didn’t turn around — and as such there was nothing left to do but keep rowing. In the dawn stillness the mirror of the house was reflected upon the lake, until at a certain distance the Disillusionment perimeter Remus had put up kicked in, and it was no longer visible. Which of course did not mean Remus was not still watching him.

\--

He pulled the boat up onto the mainland and concealed it with the appropriate spells. He would not look toward the island again. His bike was hidden in the brush where he had left it; he walked it out to the road, and then he roared it into the dawn, skin raw, all over ghost-feeling the softness and the intent and the warmth of the beloved hands; he pushed faster, faster almost than he dared, like a charge of valkyries, like a change in the direction of the wind —

He raced over the Vermont border and headed south. Shoved it faster til he felt nothing — only the searing press of the late-summer air. Only the electricity, the shivering weight of what he knew he was obliged now to do, what he had trained for all his life, the work he had wanted above all to take part in when he lay in bed in the house in the Boston safe zone overwhelmed with youth and surety that there was some greater project than this for him even now in its works…

In Manchester he picked up Route 7. There were settlements along this route whose residents eyed him from their battlements and he felt the suspicious black socket eyes of gunbarrels following his movement and sped on.

The project that was his birthright had been to abandon every certainty he had once held about this world and to learn a new set. And then, to conduct the masterwork that would end it all, to abandon them all again. To function as a sort of mercenary void of soul or history. Who had never loved — who had never been loved.

II.

The vivid shape of lightning actualized out of the dream into a brilliant strike, screaming and blinding, and it cleaved his head in two like a soft melon; he woke into it with sudden violence, eyes screwed shut, he shifted, as though to escape it, pressed his forehead into his pillow which smelled of the lake and of Sirius —

Again came the bolt afresh anew. Driving, like a hammered stake. He could not keep the sound of pain behind his teeth this time. It washed forward, and it circled back and came again; a kind of attack by waves, the way he had once commanded common dead under his own sway to drive against a wayward caravan and return to him to regroup.

This, he thought, perhaps, was the end, _beautiful friend, the end_ ; he had come to the last stop on the train and death had come sweeping shadow down the narrow aisle to punch his card at last. He could not say he was not almost relieved. With him — he closed his eyes — the rest of them were blowing away. He reached for death, and just beyond his fingertips, just beneath the palms of his hands, like a reflection-refraction of water, he felt its chill and its current. The way it felt on his skin like cold air in the winter when you first stepped outside after a blizzard. Not so much breath as stillness, biting stillness that was almost humid in its presence, and how it was all around, and how it seeped into your bones —

Despite the migraine he opened up and reached, and it reached back, and he felt —

_Remus?_

The voice.

_I can’t see you — are you alright?_

The certainty struck again through his mind in a flaying sort of shock and he could tell that he was still attached to his body, because he could feel himself curl up still tighter.

_It didn’t work_ , Sirius said. The shade of him. _It didn’t —_

So he was dead. Even as the smell of his hair was on the pillow.

_There’s someone — something at the gate. I remember you told me to run. But I can’t._

The river eddied around his feet. The pain in his head was like a splash of sun just beyond his vision. For a fraction of a second he saw Sirius’s face — the spirit of him, the suggestion of a face. He could feel the creature too at the gate, and the distant waterfall sound of it had quieted.

_Are you alright_ , Sirius asked again.

To be interrogated as such by his dead lover. _My head_ , Remus thought, _hurts_.

He had once been the apprentice of Greyback’s charged to keep desirable souls in the first precinct so they could be jammed back into their repaired bodies. The methodology for doing so had changed over time. Now it seemed they could simply shut the —

Another bolt struck, and this time it seemed it cut through his spine, and through all his bones, and through the delicate cords and the nervous net, a surge of terrible power; death said, howling in all his blood, come with me now, destroy that thing, walk with him as fast as you can to the ninth and beyond, forget it leave it burn it all forever —  
_He's there_ , Sirius said, _he's there, I saw him._

_Who’s there?_

_The — the world ender, you know, the unlocker. The King of Death._

The spirit of him was whispering, as though it mattered.

_Don’t let them get you back into the world,_ Remus said. _Whatever you do. Fight them. If they start ringing bells then scream._ He tried to look up, and to seek out Sirius’s face in the shadow again, but the light — like a shock of flame, like the sun in a mirror, thrown off the lake and through the wide windows.

_I’m coming,_ he told Sirius, _I’ll be there —_

\--

He pulled himself forth from it and puked immediately on the floor. His vision spun and lights blinked in it. He forced himself to his feet and dressed and went outside to the midnight lake where he splashed his face with cool water. On the distant shore the night birds and the crickets and the dead were screaming to one another through the darkness.

Against the water was the high white moon. On the threshold he put his bells on. His heart was beating like a war drum inside his skull and he could feel the urgent magnetic tug of death in a way he had not felt it since he was very young, and it had first happened, and he had laid awake at night in the barracks frightened to sleep, convinced it would steal him away in his dreams. Before he learned it could be fought, if one so desired. The wounds were still bad then, and they stretched tightly, and sometimes they itched, or burned, and he woke himself up scratching until they started to bleed.

_You should have let me fucking come with you_ , he thought. As though even the two of them could have faced with any modicum of possible success the lich king of death himself. As though he did not wander even now into his own eternal enslavement or exile — in the name of a cause which could only result in his permanent dissolution.

\--

He would not deny he had feared this before. The Death Lords took great pleasure in turning members of the living resistance into lesser necromancers under hypnotic power — roped with _Imperius_ and other spells into gleefully performing the very work they had once sought to end. Whenever the Death Lords took a captive to turn there were whispers and excitement in the barracks. The opportunity had arisen to show them the truth of the order of things. To infiltrate their memories for intelligence — to send them back against their former contingent, eventually, with an army of common dead.

Since Dumbledore had betrayed him Remus had feared Greyback would come for Sirius. Of course he had feared it. He would dream about it from time to time and when he woke with a splitting headache he would walk in death for awhile to assure himself it was not true. He supposed if they sent Sirius as a lesser necromancer to destroy him there was some bell- and spellwork that could lift whatever thrall of enchantment, the Binder, the Sleeper, knock him out, lift _Imperius_ , but that was if they sent Sirius alone, which they would not. And besides he would wake up from it all in screaming ecstasy of hatred for himself and everything and for the weight of death and the falseness — but so had Remus, and he had survived. If it could be called surviving.

\--

Sirius had taken the boat to the shore so Remus summoned it back and rowed, strokes of oars in time with the doors slamming in his head. Twice he had to stop and vomit before he went on. He did not remember if he had ever been this sick from it before. Certainly not in years — since the beginning. Death felt leaking inside his mind into a black pool stretching and the light from the moon in his periphery seemed almost like a high-pitched vibrating electric feedback.

He rowed — he focused into the weight of the bells. Sirius asking, _are you alright_? The way he would — he brought a cool cloth smelling of lavender and chamomile and charged with magic to press over Remus’s eyes and forehead, and then he sat beside him on the couch and rolled a joint, and kissed his ear. The spike this time went through his heart, its skip stretched out and he had to stop rowing to breathe.

What holds you here anymore, death said. Leave this fallacy to the rest of Dumbledore’s misbegotten minions.

He picked up the oars again, he rowed on.

\--

The first time he had risen dead was in a carefully structured training exercise he undertook with several of Greyback’s newest initiates in a churchyard cemetery on Route 8 between Adams and North Adams. It had been used long ago for those who had died at work in the mills and early in the days when the lock was opened a pit had been dug toward the back where bodies had been interred quickly and of course impermanently. It was on these corpses that Greyback’s youngest necromancers cut their teeth.

They had walked in death with the older necromancers in the barracks huddling together in confusion and fear, and they had practiced commanding spirits there with bells. Most of Greyback’s used the Waker before any other bells and many of them carried abbreviated bandoliers containing only the necessary implements with the fewest consequences. The bandolier that Remus had been given was stained with and smelled like blood and the leather was tooled and filigreed with abstract runic patterns, and it was butter-soft with age, and had been repaired many times with magic at the shoulder where it had been cut or rubbed through. The handles of the bells were bone and their wear indicated the frequency with which their former owner had used each. The most worn was the Binder, whose tone — powerful and deep and sonorous, not harsh — Remus found he liked. It forced obedience from the dead but it could also have its wicked way with the ringer if one’s will was anything less than concrete. As such Remus had learned quickly to think deliberately.

The other young necromancers in the barracks told Remus that his bells had belonged formerly to someone who had abused her power, but they would not tell him how so. He slept with them under his pillow wrapping his fingers in the leather so they would not be tampered with or stolen. Years later he sent a paper boat in death after her but she would not come.

Anyway in the cemetery. One only had to dip a toe in death to find spirits clambering to get out — that was the easy part. They were pulled forth and fragmented if necessary and driven into bodies with a bit of concentration and magic, or other work could be done to manifest them as shadow. Then they were asked to conduct their dead like an orchestra — “Charge them,” Greyback would say, leaning on a headstone with a cigar. “Team them up — formations. Make three of them destroy the other.” While you waited your turn you were supposed to keep an eye and help your fellow trainees if they screwed up, but no one did. Sometimes Greyback wouldn’t intervene if the dead turned on a young necromancer, despite all the effort he’d allegedly gone to in order to “feed, house, clothe, and resurrect you all” in the first place. Some kids fumbled bells, or they screwed up spells, or their dead milled in circles, or they walked themselves into death by accident. In these circumstances everyone would laugh hysterically and develop for the unfortunate soul a humiliating nickname.

Remus was already among the youngest and very skinny and came from a resistance caravan, and his bells had belonged to a traitor. The night before the exercise in the pale crescent moonlight between the clouds he had practiced drawing the bells and switching between them whilst holding his wand and performing the necessaries. In the cemetery when it was his turn he came forward and took the stance and drew the Binder.

“Interesting choice,” said Greyback around the cigar. “Are you sure about that one?”

Remus ignored him. Reached back into the ice maw of death. After the execution of this act he could not call himself anything other than necromancer and this he understood. It was a step forward across a threshold. He could not recall what if anything he had felt about it in that moment. He was eleven years old and mostly he didn’t want to be pranked in his sleep.

They came forth easily, almost into his hand, they felt slippery like tadpoles, and he felt out the bodies in the ground and introduced them. There were two left over he pulled out with him and into shadow. Then he opened his eyes. Beside him the revenant black mist hummed and buzzed with electricity, and through their unform he could see the common dead — eight of them — dragging themselves forth from the ground.

He rung the Binder and focused them all to his will. The trick was to think of nothing other than what must be done. Which of now, because Greyback hadn’t given an order, was simply, _be still, you belong to me, be still_. He was thinking of it like he had in the days his parents’ caravan had driven livestock and he would be tasked occasionally to run alongside them and keep them in walking order with spoken commands. Like cattle and sheep and horses the dead had lesser animal minds and they required direction, usually of the same sort. _Go ahead, move forward, you belong to me. Be still, stay here, you belong to me._

“Charge them,” Greyback said, “toward me. Stop them before they get here.”

As though Greyback couldn’t stop them himself. But his hands weren't even on his bells. Remus switched the Binder for the Walker and rung it, focusing, _run forward, run, go_ , and they did. They moved stiffly at first then faster, their decaying anatomy grotesque, mostly bones, and rotting skin; some of them were very long dead. He allowed himself a split second’s fantasy regarding what would happen if he didn’t stop them before they reached Greyback. But he did stop them, with the Binder again, up short, like against an invisible wall.

“Good, Remus,” Greyback said. It itched when Greyback called him by his name. His hand twitched on the bell. “Destroy the common dead with the shadow.”

It was a simple matter of dividing their threads in his mind, and he did it. When the corpses were vacated he walked the shadow things back into death at Greyback’s instruction. Then his turn was over, and he was obliged to magically bury the corpses again for the next student.

“You’re very powerful,” Greyback said to him, when he was done. His hand was broad and too-warm against Remus’s back, and slowly it moved to his shoulder where it squeezed until the squeeze was painful and the sharpened fingernails — and the voice rumbled close to Remus’s ear. “Do not forget whom you serve.”

He had already by then forgotten. Or rather he had misremembered. He knew he served death as death was supposed to be.

\--

His car was the big black station wagon he had stolen in North Adams when he had left the barracks. It had belonged to one of Greyback’s most prized necromancers, who had often driven it into battle, and it had been decorated with necromantic symbology, which Remus had painted over as soon as he dared leave the Adirondack cottage to seek out paint at an automotive store. It was the car in which he had found Sirius and driven him unconscious and mauled nearly to death back up into the mountains feeling at last as though he’d finally lost his fucking mind. There were old bloodstains in the backseat from that fateful day he wouldn’t look at.

There were dead in the woods, he could feel them watching. There were always dead in the woods. They could smell death on him and they could see his bells and as such they wouldn’t come near. They had developed in the years a self-preservation instinct typical to prey animals like deer or rabbits.

The gas in the car by its measure would get him to Massachusetts. It hummed to life, all warmth and magic, he had left the AC on, and the radio, which blared static; he quickly turned both off.

The Death Lords’ lesser necromancers decorated their vehicles with painted text and images and sometimes mounted skulls on the hood and the roof and they flew vivid and horrible flags like Jolly Rogers they had dyed with magic and bewitched with moving images, inhuman faces which stretched and screamed, a river moving, a wound bubbling frothy whitish blood. They drove in warmaking caravans on the old highways. Some of the vehicles were even bewitched to fly, or could be used as battering rams. On such occasions the youngest necromancers would drive even if their feet could hardly touch the gas and brake pedals whilst from the backseat and the opened or smashed-out windows the elders would raise and command armies of dead with bells and magic who wandered around and behind the vehicles slavering in their curious hunger. Remus had driven in caravans of the sort comprising necromancers and dead under Greyback, Nott, Karkaroff, Dolohov, the Lestranges, against the encampments of living in Brattleboro and Keene, Athol, Worcester. By the time he left Greyback’s contingent had made inroads in a yearlong siege of Leominster and rumor had it that the King of Death himself was pleased. Two years later a loose alliance of Death Lords and associates would seize Framingham, Waltham, and finally Boston along the old Interstate 90.

His guilt sometimes felt like stone cleaving. He sometimes wondered if his migraines were not in fact the physical manifestation of the death that would not let him go so much as they were actualizations of his guilt. Sirius came to the cottage to tell him, and he was crying. He looked so young, and like he needed to be held, and Remus had never dared to entertain he would ever come back again. They embraced on the threshold and then they sat on the cold slate flagstones and Sirius wept in his arms and he held tightly because he wasn’t sure of what else to do. He thought for a while perhaps he was dreaming. The door was open, and he watched outside it, and he pressed his nose against Sirius's temple and then under his jaw, and he breathed, the smell, like woods and gasoline, the magic smell, and like his sweat, and his hair, and cigarettes. The autumn afternoons and the long winter he had wandered alone on the property and driven around the mountains in search of dead to banish following their tracks in the snow and sleeping in each morning when for a while in the warmth of his piled blankets and the heat of the embers in the stove he could almost imagine he was not alone in the bed.

Sirius touched him with a tremendous and shocking care; he would put Remus’s fingers in his mouth and kiss him literally anywhere, and he looked at Remus as though he were a stained glass window or something, unshattered and miraculous, with the sun coming through, just so, holiest of holies… He thought sex didn’t so much make him feel alive (the worst part was, he did feel alive, he always felt alive, but he knew he really wasn’t, or at least he wasn’t as alive as he should be, as he had once been) as it made him feel free, like he belonged only to his body, which was loved by another body and another — he belonged to his soul which was loved by another soul —

“Stop thinking about it,” he said aloud to himself in the car. His knuckles were so throttling white upon the steering wheel that the skin with its fading tattoos looked like blue willow china.

\--

He drove across the Vermont border and found Route 7 as the sun was rising. A few dead followed the car and he itched to banish them but knew when they reached Massachusetts he would need to bind them instead, if any of them could withstand the interim heat of the day between these lands and the region of storms. The late-summer green was still thick along the highway and the swamps and the burns were vivid against the lush foliage and in the sunrise haze the mountains looked torn into the sky. He drove and the dead followed past abandoned settlements and inhabited ones where the night watch signaled his arrival with flares and the dead disappeared into the woods. He knew not a day previous Sirius had come this way on the bike. He disguised his bells and his hands with magic because he knew from experience necromancers were attacked on sight and sometimes shot at. A scouting group of Nott’s had once been blown to instant bits by a Molotov Cocktail cleverly lobbed with a kind of medieval slingshot from the ramparts of the defenses at Leominster.

I am going to try and end this, he wanted to call out the window of the car. I am going to close it forever. Even if it destroys me.

When the sky blushed to full light his head started pounding again and he tried a few spells to shield his eyes from the sun to no avail. It struck through behind his eyes in bolts and with it he remembered —

They were driving in the fog together and they walked in the woods — they went back to where Remus lived, and Sirius made a fire in the fireplace, and they watched the birds on the lake, and it started snowing, they made dinner together with what scraps they could scrape together from Remus’s pantry; it tasted like cardboard, but they laughed, they smoked a joint and ran around in the snow, and when they came inside they made love on the kitchen floor; he wasn’t looking at his hands, he wasn’t thinking about what he was, he wasn’t thinking about anything all except the larger thing, between them, about how miraculous it was that they had found each other, which they would not have if every horrible thing had not happened, if every horrible thing had not spawned one good thing, like, the best thing, the only thing, he sometimes thought, that really mattered.

If he closed his eyes and reached the cold river and its swift current was right there and beyond it —

He drug himself forth from his own mind at the last, nearly totaled the car, pulled over, puked, and drove on.

\--

The border had been haphazardly fenced and marked with skulls and flags about a decade previous. No longer was the crossing point protected by Death Lords’ legions, because no one living dared to cross it. The blocks on the roadways had been drug away by necromancers’ caravans heading northward toward the settlements and as such Remus crossed easily into the region of darkness in which he had spent five years learning to raise the dead. He got off the highway as soon as he could to take instead the back roads southeast toward the mountain and he lifted the magical disguises he’d put on his bells and he unsnapped the buckle that held the Binder in so he could draw it quickly if necessary. Almost subconsciously he found himself whistling the low sweet tone of it. It had been a comfort to him as long as he could remember and a nervous habit and sometimes he would even whistle it while Sirius was around; _stay still, you belong to me —_

It was a beautiful country here and haunted as he recalled from his youth. Elsewhere because of the lack of rain the landscape had lost color but here the foliage along the sunken road that paralleled the river and the highway was a vivid possessed green except where lightning had burst trees open and set their burnt-black witches’ fingers reaching for the thunderstorm sky. The houses and motels set against the banks and the hills were either abandoned or had been co-opted as necromancers’ barracks or the strange hostels of the dead and they were painted on the doors with bright hex signs and foreboding words and in some of the driveways and overgrown lawns full caravans of death-trip vehicles were parked. Off to the south in the haze and cloud lightning struck repeatedly and seemingly in tandem throb with the strikes of Remus’s headache — the electrical torture they had put to death to keep its gaping wound open.

He crossed the river and drove the familiar backroads up into the foothills of the mountain. It was getting to be broadest day so most dead things — necromancers included — were asleep or hiding in the darkness against the itchy feeling of the sun which customarily Remus himself also ignored. In the thick treecover closest to the mountain road though he found the car once again beset by a dozen curious and loping common dead, shuffling, dragging; to them Remus was unfamiliar, with unfamiliar magic, and they couldn’t hear him whistling the tone of the Binder, and they were emboldened by their closeness to the lock. He’d never set foot very high on the mountain in his days serving Greyback, but he had learnt from various rumors that the King of Death occupied an obelisk on the very summit which had been built long ago. Occasionally he invited his greater Death Lords to join him there for projects requiring many hands — inroads into death, and the whispered-of quest to break whatever filter existed upon the bridge beyond the ninth gate. Otherwise he was solitary. Even his most trusted lieutenants lived further down the southern road.

The north road had been torn up long ago against interlopers and when Remus could drive no longer he parked the car and Disillusioned it, and with the Binder he harnessed the score of dead that had come to follow him. There were more ahead, now, he could sense them, and there were things buried; there was so much death here he felt he could draw it all out if he wanted, like poison from a wound. Nevermind he was rather out of practice. He’d always been deft with common and shadow dead but at the summit there would be larger — there would be, he thought, for the first time, more horrible dead things than he had ever seen in his life before. More uncanny nightmare wrongness that perhaps he did not yet even understand was possible. Sirius had seen it and now Sirius was dead. Under such conditionality Remus would have to be so very careful about the bodies and the souls he occupied and animated…

Up the long hill in the shadow he walked calling them to him on his way and after a while he found he only needed to whistle the tone of the Binder to get them to fall in line. Already there was a piece of him like a toe or a heel in death and as he drew them out sometimes he was certain he could feel Sirius there; he thought, _don’t come too close, stay away from me_ , which at first he had thought, like he couldn’t shake it from his head, when Sirius had woken up in the cottage from his long fever, and his fear was like a bad wind, or like a taste of rot, Remus could feel it. He lay awake on the couch staring at the water stains in the ceiling and when he touched Sirius even just to check the neat laddered rows of the stitches he had administered on the kitchen table he felt Sirius flinch and grit his teeth. As if the meaning of his hands was larger even than synecdochal referent.

He wondered if he were catching. He knew he was a monster. If his condition could be transmitted by a bite, or like an illness. Just by virtue of his breathing.

_Stay away from me,_ he thought. _For your own good._ And Sirius had, until he didn’t. They kissed in the garden, it smelled like tomato plants and mulch and summer, and he dared to touch Sirius’s hair, which was warm with the sun, and there was dirt between his toes. It felt for just — like, in the silence between heartbeats, like the door to death at the back of his mind at last had shut. The crickets and the birds were singing and the sun was golden in the trees and the grass, and Sirius’s hands were under his shirt, at his hips, toward the small of his back, and warm, but the nails were ragged.

Love was not particular to the living, he learned, quickly, nor was pleasure, nor was heartbreak.

After an hour’s climb Remus and his shambling joint-creaking army, bones rubbing — he heard them calling to one another in their decaying warbling whispers — left the old road for the trail and hiked still upwards. There were always dead in the woods and they came and joined him at the sound of the tones he was whistling, and as they climbed higher and the valley and the hills spread out below like a colorbox of jewels in the unfolding haze he summoned forth shadow and he woke up things he should’ve been frightened to touch who towered above him reeking of blood and grave soil bearing hideous scarred unbodies he sometimes could not see the human in and yet they too walked with him with naught more convincing than the sound of his binding whistle. Above them all the storm was gathering so close now he at last began to hear the thunder. His head was pounding in a similar percussive rumble bursting light just outside his vision and he wondered how many of the dead who walked with him suffered with it too. If they also in whatever remained of their hearts and minds — if somewhere in the far back dusty corners of their subdivided souls they longed to go home.

\--

At the summit of the mountain, at the end of the long torn-up road, was a great stone tower and a half-burnt house. The wind came up from the long valley blinding in its intensity and the lightning crackled every few seconds toward the rod atop the obelisk’s pergola, spitfire like a dropped wire, like a very old and very feral magic, and the force of it had cleared long ago all the green foliage from the periphery of the summit. Off the steep escarpment the valley was a wild stretching patchwork thing unto the edge of darkness where for perhaps two decades it had been denied the touch of rain. He could see the shadow of the old town of Adams to the East and the struggling greenish bed of the river there which had powered and driven the old mills a century previous and now was dammed to still its flow for the comfort of its population of dead and necromancers. To the West in the weaving spire of the high clouds the sun was slipping into a burning low sunset.

Remus felt as his back now down the old trail a confluence of perhaps six score dead under his own command. Most necromancers recommended jurisdiction over no more than fifty at one time. He could feel the threads of them in his mind disparate but braided, and he could hear their rotting bones clattering; they had struggled on the steep bits, and sometimes trampled each other, and they had assumed ranks among themselves, led by the most grotesque of the beings, who had come to lope along just beside Remus like dogs. Behind them was a wall of shadow, sentient swarming spirits like clouds of night or insects, and behind them at least one hundred common dead. Remus had only gathered so much to himself before to banish them immediately subsequently and he felt wild and lightning-struck with power, and in the back of his mind the door to death was almost breathing and the bells in their cases against his chest seemed to vibrate —

But for the omnipresent and indecipherable voice of the thunder it was eerily silent and he knew it could not be this way for long. The dead things beside him turned their unfaces in his direction curiously. He drew the Binder and the Walker but held them by the clappers so they would not ring.

They had not taken ten steps together toward the obelisk when the darkness seemed to compound and double and manifest from it, silhouetted in a flash of lightning, was the King of Death himself. It was less human even than the suggestions of things that flanked Remus and its body was corrupt with years and the massive insectoid wings it bore seemed moth-eaten in fraying holes and it had no eyes or its eyes were almost black in the nest of skin which was white as soap or salt. Its mouth when it opened it to speak was a suggestion of a gateway.

“Another attempt,” it said. The sound of it rolled like thunder.

The King of Death had opened this lock to master death, the necromancers had whispered in the barracks, and it was only after Remus left the encampment that he realized no doubt he had wanted to master death because he feared it. It was why he was working to break the filter beyond the ninth gate — he feared the very existence of some region beyond which there was no returning to life.

“At least this time you have bells,” said the King of Death, “and dead with you. Not quite so much a foolhardy attempt as the last.”

The lightning came again, and this time in the reflective flash of it Remus saw the tangled wreckage, the silvery scrap-metal heap in the door of the obelisk, which was Sirius’s motorbike. The thunder following took a kind of clawed grip around his brain just behind his eyes.

“I’ve been working on his body,” said the King of Death, and the smile spreading across its face was wet with blood. “I won’t deny it gives me a childish pleasure to bind one of the Order’s.”

A lesser necromancer should not speak in the presence of a Death Lord; Remus remembered this from his youth. He flipped the Walker to ring it but it froze and the metal cracked in a spiderwebbing pattern; he could feel the King of Death’s magic crushing it as an invisible fist in midair, until the pieces of the bell fell at last, ember-red, to his feet. So he whistled the tone of it instead as loudly as he could, and he tugged the strings of all the dead inside his mind, and he drove them onward.

All he needed was five minutes’ distraction. He wondered where Sirius’s body was, but it did not matter. The King of Death had summoned forth his own army of dead from parts unseen, and his ranks were larger and his dead were stronger; their bodies were new, and their spirits starved and energetic, and as they clashed with Remus’s the lightning and the thunder struck again so close and loud and vivid it was briefly disorienting.

He whistled the high jaunty tone of the Walker and conducted his dead ever toward the obelisk. He could not risk the physical bells he would need to close the lock so he pressed forward through his own ranks and whistled the low and seductive peal of the Binder toward the enemy legion. In case the King of Death’s grip on any of them was absentminded enough Remus could seize the reins with such a delicate sound.

The black angel itself was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps it had gone again to work on Sirius’s body, to prepare it as was necessary for lifeishness again with darkest magic. Or else it had gone to watch over the lock itself in the doorway of the obelisk with the abstract metallic scrap of the bike.

He pressed forward through his dead whistling the tone of the Binder and he focused into the enemy legions all he could muster of his will. _You belong to me. Every ghost trace of your pain (of our pain) I alone can end it. You belong to me —_

Some joined him and some did not. When they did not he drew his wand and banished their souls and occupied the bodies with another. His head ached with an almost cold intensity seeping through the rest of him like spring meltwater. Every strike of lightning like a blow upon the existing wound. Every moment of frustrated movement a moment in which the King of Death made the necessary preparations —

He shoved forward, whistling the low binding tone; the dead scrabbled at his bells, at his skin and hair, tearing his clothes, drawing blood they leapt for, black and toothful mouths stretching open; he shouted a spell, _relashio_ , driving them back, vacating their animating souls. One of his most horrible dead things, serpentine but walking, grotesquely elongated, eyes situated below its mouth, walked with him, protecting him, until it was overpowered. The towering and vile thing that took it Remus wounded with a curse from his wand then banished but it was too late for his creature and there was no time to revive the enemy thing with another soul.

He wasn’t ten yards from the steps of the obelisk but the space between swarmed with enemy dead seemingly insurmountable who had tasted his blood, livingish blood, and they starved now to drain the rest of it. He was bleeding from clawmarks down his arm and across his neck that had narrowly missed cleaving through the leather of his bandolier, and he was missing a bell, and the two most useful he needed to save for the final task, and there were too many enemy dead now for magic or whistling; there were more dead than he had ever seen, and they were fresh, and they were strong —

Desperately he drew the Thinker remembering the pathetic occasion upon which he had drawn it on Sirius. He hadn’t been certain what he had been thinking but it had seemed to make the most sense. Erase this memory, he had been thinking, erase it from him and from me, delete it forever. He did not think he could bear to recall not the betrayal itself but how happy he had been before. And how certain he had been before — how wild and sick with love. How — they were lying in the sun in the grass and his head was in Sirius’s lap and Sirius stroked his hair, and he was so happy — it was like a kind of golden knife through him how happy. The most pure and dangerous fantasy he had only in those stolen moments entertained, which was that perhaps the world outside stayed very still when he did not look at it. But those had been same hands, and the same lips that had lied — and anyway later Remus had forgiven him, because the intactfulness of the memory, the good memory, so outweighed the bad —

He closed his mind to the sound of it and rung the clattering vivid breathy sound like a school bell. It would not negate the sound of the Binder; he knew that. This bell had never been his strong suit but if accurately deployed it could bring back a semblance of the dead’s memories. Some of them scattered fearfully just at the sound of any bell, and several more paused in their seething and simply watched him, milling confusedly, suddenly possessed by a new and unfamiliar directive. He was certain more than one of them had until recently been members of settlements or resistance caravans. They recalled enough now to see him for what he was, and for what he attempted, for all his life and unlife, for eleven years’ desperate clinging to something to which he no longer belonged — in the name of performing this, this very act. The project that was his birthright.

It was all the confusion he needed to run through the loosening ranks of enemy dead and up the stairs to the obelisk, to vault over the shredded corpse of Sirius’s bike into the dank stone room where upon the floor glimmered something open. It was not describable; it was like wind made flesh, or like water just before ice, and it was like blood when he touched it, almost viscous, but there was no print against his hand. An inconsistency in the fabric of world. His hands were shaking when he drew the bells. He had dropped the Thinker in his running but it no longer mattered — if this worked which it had to there would be no need for him or anyone to wield bells again.

Lightning slammed in the window bleeding against his vision then thunder — the long deep voice of it in the valley. Death closer now than it had ever been. Death not so much a door in the back of his mind now as a whole half of himself stretching through the pain in his head a kind of soothing and seductive numbness.

Outside in the fray he could feel at last the liquid shadow of the King of Death hulking and manifest spreading silhouette along the opposite wall. The wings unfolded, blackening against the darkness —

Remus rung the Binder and the Sleeper together and the rhythm shifted soft like a lullaby and he thought, _be still, you belong to me, sleep, you belong to me_ — and he realized what exactly he was doing as it happened. One had to seize command of death to close it.

_You belong to me._

It was all of his self now and there was no pain. He stood; he felt death diffuse through himself, like a cold thread, a profound unweight, an incredible lightness… The lullaby of the bells continued but he was no longer ringing them. The sound of battle had gone from outside, and the shadow spreading across the wall was still, and he looked up into the window for the lightning and instead saw the telltale mist-gray wash of rain spread in cleansing roar like some great flood through the valley —

He closed his eyes and reached. It swallowed him now and he allowed it. At last, he thought, at last, at last, and he pressed forward desperately into the darkness, and in the deepest well of it he felt someone take his hand.

**Author's Note:**

> the comic strip in the middle of this is by the breathtakingly talented [moscca](http://moscca.tumblr.com/post/155122424781/the-creature-which-fought-itself-free-from-nowhere).


End file.
